Chapter Summary

In the Netherlands Joost van den Vondel is traditionally regarded as the 'prince of our poets'. The Dutch are proud of Vondel. The seventeenth century had been a Golden Age; never had the Netherlands been so prosperous, so powerful, and so culturally rich as it was then. By the eighteenth century little remained of the admiration for Vondel as a writer for the theatre. At the beginning of the nineteenth various different notes were sounded. In reaction to the French classicism that had been dominant throughout the eighteenth century, more value was now attached to poetic originality. At the same time there was increasing admiration for the great Greek authors who had laid the foundations of European theatre, and in this context fresh admiration arose for Vondel as a representative of classical Greek theatre. Vondel editor Alberdingk Thijm is regarded as the founder of the Roman Catholic Vondel school.